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Public Domain · 1916-1922

Trabue Language Scale: Verbal completion test

Group test of verbal completion - 'The cat ___ the mouse.' Trabue's Language Scale published 1916 with revised norms in 1922. One of the first standardized measures of verbal ability for school use. Survives as a research tool in studies of reading comprehension.

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About the Trabue Language Scale

In 1897 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had proposed the verbal completion task - sentences with one or more words missing, which the subject must supply - as a measure of intelligence. Ebbinghaus argued that filling a gap correctly required understanding the surrounding context, which involved many of the same cognitive operations as intelligent thinking generally.

Trabue's 1916 work standardized this idea for use in American schools. He developed five scales of increasing difficulty, with sentences calibrated to grades 1 through 12. Each scale contained 20-30 sentences with 2-3 blanks each. The subject filled in each blank with the best word. Scoring was done by a list of acceptable answers compiled from large normative samples.

The completion-test idea has persisted: it survives in modern verbal aptitude tests (the SAT verbal sentence completion items, GRE analogies, etc.) and in clinical neuropsychology (sentence completion as a measure of expressive language). Trabue's specific scales were used widely in the 1920s for verbal-IQ screening in schools.

The 1 subtests

#1
Verbal completion items (graded scales) Fill the blank(s) in each sentence with the best word. Scoring uses a published list of acceptable answers.
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Sample items adapted from Trabue's original 1916 sentences. Items get progressively harder.

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About these items: These Trabue Language Scale items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1922 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice. See the original source for the authentic 1922-era items in their original administration format.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Trabue, M. R. (1916). Completion Test Language Scales. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Public domain. Marion Trabue was a Columbia Teachers College student who built on Ebbinghaus's 1897 completion-test concept to create a standardized school-use scale. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/keyforcompletion00tra.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS · CSL JSON

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

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The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.